Kenneth M. Pollack, Arabs at War:
Military Effectiveness, 1948–1991.
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002.
Dan Reiter and Allan C. Stam III,
Democracies at War. Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 2002.
Throughout history,
states have exhibited a puzzling degree of variation in their capacities to create
military power. Some consistently excel at warfare. Germany in the late nine-
teenth and early twentieth centuries, for example, has long been singled out
for its military’s exceptional tactical proªciency, especially in the battles of both
world wars. Others—such as Italy in those same conºicts—often perform
poorly, demonstrating endemic weaknesses in their abilities to generate mili-
tary force.1 Yet a third category of states exhibits curious variation in military
effectiveness over time. Most analysts, for example, count Egypt’s perfor-
mance in the 1967 Six Day War against Israel among the most dismal of con-
temporary military history. They also tend to agree, however, that in the 1973
October War Egypt was able to dramatically improve its effectiveness, mani-
fest most vividly in the military’s textbook crossing of the Suez Canal.
Why are some states, at some times, better able to translate their basic
material and human strengths into military power? Sociologists and military
historians have long been interested in this question, often focusing on the hu-
man relations among soldiers and quality of leaders that make some militaries
exceptional. More recently, political scientists have evinced growing interest in
149
International Security, Vol. 28, No. 2 (Fall 2003), pp. 149–191
© 2003 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Making Military Might
Making Military Might:
Why Do States Fail and
Succeed?
Risa A. Brooks
A Review Essay
Risa A. Brooks is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University.
The author wishes to thank Stephen Biddle, Michael Desch, Elizabeth Kier, David Lake, and Eliza-
beth Stanley-Mitchell for helpful comments and reactions. She also wishes to thank Lee Seymour
for research assistance.
1. On Italy see, for example, “Italian Military Efªciency—A Debate,” Journal of Strategic Studies,
Vol. 5, No. 2 (June 1982), pp. 248–278. On overviews of Egypt’s performance in the wars, see Trevor
N. Dupuy, Elusive Victory: The Arab Israeli Wars, 1947–1974 (New York: Harper and Row, 1978); and
Chaim Herzog, The Arab-Israeli Wars: War and Peace in the Middle East from the War of Independence
through Lebanon (New York: Random House, 1982). Germany is discussed later in this essay.

exploring the sources of states’ military effectiveness. In the 1990s Stephen
Rosen, for example, analyzed how colonial India’s caste system, and states’ so-
cial structures more broadly, inºuence the capacity to mobilize and utilize the
armed forces in war.2 Stephen Biddle and Robert Zirkle explored how differ-
ences in Iraqi and North Vietnamese civil-military relations affected assimila-
tion of new military technologies.3 Others wrote on the effects of culture and
technology on effectiveness, and a more recent generation of scholars has in-
vestigated the effects of ideology and nationalism on ªghting motivation.4 This
complements a more established literature on military change, innovation, and
politico-military doctrine, which at times addresses (tangentially) issues of
military effectiveness.5 The common focus in all this scholarship is on how so-
cial, political, and cultural factors shape the capacity to use material or other
resources to create military power.
This attention to military effectiveness by political scientists is arguably long
overdue. The study of military effectiveness is central to the discipline’s aca-
International Security 28:2 150
2. Stephen Peter Rosen, Societies and Military Power: India and Its Armies (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Uni-
versity Press, 1996).
3. Stephen Biddle and Robert Zirkle, “Technology, Civil-Military Relations, and Warfare in the De-
veloping World: Conventional Proliferation and Military Effectiveness in Developing States,” Jour-
nal of Strategic Studies, Vol. 19, No. 2 (June 1996), pp. 171–212.
4. See Christopher S. Parker, “New Weapons for Old Problems: Conventional Proliferation and
Military Effectiveness in Developing States,” International Security, Vol. 23, No. 4 (Spring 1999),
pp. 119–147. Kenneth M. Pollack, “The Inºuence of Arab Culture on Arab Military Effectiveness,”
Ph.D. dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1996; Norville de Atkine, “Why Arab
Armies Lose Wars,” MERIA, Vol. 4, No. 1 (March 2000), pp. 16–27, http://meria.idc.ac.il/journal/
2000/issue1/jv4n1a2.html#Author; Tania M. Chacho, “Why Did They Fight? American Airborne
Units in the Second World War,” paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political
Science Association, San Francisco, California, August 30–September 2, 2001; and Jasen Castillo,
“The Will to Fight: Explaining a Nation’s Determination in War,” paper prepared for delivery at
the annual meeting of the International Studies Association, Chicago, Illinois, February 21, 2001.
5. Works on doctrine and military innovation include Barry R. Posen, The Sources of Military Doc-
trine: France, Britain, and Germany between the World Wars (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press,
1984); Jack Snyder, “Civil-Military Relations and the Cult of the Offensive, 1914 and 1984,” in Ste-
ven E. Miller, ed., Military Strategy and the Origins of the First World War (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 1991), pp. 20–58; Stephen Van Evera, “The Cult of the Offensive and the Origins
of the First World War,” in ibid., pp. 59–108; Elizabeth Kier, Imagining War: French and British Mili-
tary Doctrine between the World Wars (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997); Jeffrey W.
Legro, Cooperation under Fire: Anglo-German Restraint during World War II (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Uni-
versity Press, 1995); Kimberly Marten Zisk, Engaging the Enemy: Organization Theory and Soviet Mili-
tary Innovation, 1955–1991 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993); Deborah D. Avant,
Political Institutions and Military Change: Lessons from Peripheral Wars (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univer-
sity Press, 1994); Emily O. Goldman and Richard B. Andres, “Systemic Effects of Military Innova-
tion and Diffusion,” Security Studies, Vol. 8, No. 4 (September 1998), pp. 67–85; and Theo Farrell
and Terry Terriff, eds., The Sources of Military Change: Culture, Politics, Technology (Boulder, Colo.:
Lynne Rienner, 2002).